Have many of you noticed that programs that are intuitive to use seem to be
few and far between? By intuitive I mean that the layman user should be able
to know what to do/where to go with a very minimum of referral in the
manual.

For that matter I have wondered for years why all these "Dummy's Guides to
....." that are suppose to supplement the official technical literature -
and explain it - are all 1000 pages or so. Who has time to read that crap?

I have programmed only for 2 large organizations, both for a reasonably
short period of time.

The pressures to "get something out" no matter how ugly - were immense.

Never will forget years ago whole at some little agency (Teacher
Credentialing - an organization that was so small it wasn't even on the
State of California's Hierarchy chart) - I had designed a nice IMAGE schema
to accomplish easily that would have streamlined their process - Had the
programs already designed.

A "co worker" - a meathead who wrote spaghetti code in COBOL (that was his
forte) talked to our boss before me and convinced him we "had to get
something out now" - so  to save a month or so of coding produced some crap
(don't know what else to call it) that they complained about for years after
I left.

I guess the opportunity to really design and write elegant code is really
few and far between. Unless you have your own company, which I do.

BASIC programs that  I wrote   20 years ago with VIEW and IMAGE are still
going along nicely thanks to good basic designs. Because they are reasonably
structured they are easy to enhance.

As to Alfredo's mentioning of good error handling, I miss the switch
construct that C has - haven't been writing in C lately.

For examples of bad programming one need go no further than most of the
Windows apps - but I guess they met deadlines. And patch them for years
afterwards.

Bill

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